Advanced Typography Task 3
28/8/2023 - 1/12/2023 Week 1 - Week 14
Wong Kai Xin / 0353027
Advanced Typography / Bachelor of Design in Creative Media / The Design School
Task 3
LECTURES / CLASS NOTES
Week 1-3
lectures
Week 5-6
lectures
INSTRUCTIONS
EXERCISES
For my final task, I have decided to continue developing my font
from my
exercises task 2, since I have only developed 5 letters at that time. I quite liked
the whole idea and look behind my font and I have always wanted to dedicate a project to my pet gecko.
Fig 1.1 picture reference 1
Fig 1.2 picture reference 2
Even though I had already designed the letters, "H", "A" ,"O" ,"M" ,"G" from my previous exercise, I still refined it to maintain the consistency among all letterforms.
Fig 1.3 the letters "H", "A" ,"O" ,"M" ,"G" from exercise 2
Fig 1.4 letterform refining progress 10/11/2023
I then moved on to designing my numbers as well as punctuations. I was not familiar with the sizing of the punctuations so I used my reference font (Cliche) as reference of approximately how big each punctuation should be next to letterforms.
Fig 1.5 reference font punctuation and letter comparison
Fig 1.6 numbers refining progress 15/11/2023
Fig 1.7 punctuations refining progress 15/11/2023
Development process in Fontlab 8
Fig 2.1 first attempt on typing my font 17/11/2023
after developing the font in fontlab 8, I realised that the
thickness had an obvious difference, especially with the
letter "O", so I went back to illustrator to reduce the thickness.
Fig 2.2 before kerning 20/11/2023
Fig 2.3 after kerning 20/11/2023
Font presentation progress
For font presentation, we were to present our font in a fun and interesting way.
Fig 3.1 First draft on font presentation 25/11/2023
I didn't have a clear path and theme on how I wanted to present my fonts so I just went with whatever i thought looked good, hoping to get inspiration. After my first draft, I figured I should include gecko as it is what created this whole font, so I decided to use the pattern of a gecko as the theme.
Fig 3.2 color palette
Fig 3.3 final look of my font presentation 29/11/2023
Font application progress
At first, I was confused and lost on what, where, how I wanted my
font to be used as.
Fig 4.1 exploring stage 23/11/2023
My first thought was for it to be a display font for album covers,
but figured that it would be a little too general.
Fig 4.2 album cover drafts 25/11/2023
However after taking a look at the left picture on Fig 4.2, Mr Vinod
suggested that the font looked kind of like a gummy and that was
how the final decision was made: a display font for gummies
Fig 4.3 inspiration board 25/11/2023
Fig 4.4 color palette
For the color palette, I went with the general colors of gummy
bears to be on theme.
Fig 4.5 draft for font application 29/11/2023
For the draft on Fig 4.5, I realised I had done it wrong as I have
distorted my own font when I should be displaying it as it
is.
Fig 4.6 final font application & presentation 29/11/2023
1. Generated font link to your .ttf font.
2. Font Presentation
of your font AZ; a-z; 0-9; punctuations
Fig 5.1 Font presentation 1 (JPEG)
Fig 5.2 Font presentation 2 (JPEG)
Fig 5.3 Font presentation 3 (JPEG)
Fig 5.4 Font presentation 4 (JPEG)
Fig 5.5 Font presentation (PDF)
3. Font Application
Fig 6.1 Font application 1 (JPEG)
Fig 6.2 Font application 2 (JPEG)
Fig 6.3 Font application 3 (JPEG)
Fig 6.4 Font application 4 (JPEG)
Fig 6.5 Font application (PDF)
FEEDBACK
Week 9:
Specific feedback
- maintain consistency by using strokes from refined letters
Week 10:
Specific feedback
- mid-height of lowercase letters too short, make it higher
- strokes have to maintain consistent thickness
- place lowercase and uppercase letters side by side
- "s" needs to be more refined
Week 11:
General feedback
- print out all letterforms and see if the sizing is okay, if not make necessary changes
Week 13:
Specific feedback
- font looks like gummies so try using the font as a display font for advertising gummy bears
- make a color palette
Week 14:
Specific feedback
- reduce shadow
- don't distort your font
- try to have consistent background for font presentation, come up with a color palette for presentation as well
Specific feedback
- reduce shadow
- don't distort your font
- try to have consistent background for font presentation, come up with a color palette for presentation as well
REFLECTION
Experience
As usual, the final task is always the most challenging and time consuming. However, I genuinely enjoyed this task as I was actually doing something I like, generating a font inspired by my beloved pet as well. It was the hardest to always maintain consistency for me. So, I will always remember now to have a color palette, theme, for presentations, as well as common strokes for letterforms. It is sad that this would be my last typography project, but I really loved the whole learning process and is thankful that I got to experience this.
Observation
Through this task, I have observed that having a good time management is extremely important for designers. Nothing will turn out good if your work is rushed. Fortunately with the help from mr Vinod, he made sure we had a certain part done within each week so it really helped with managing our work throughout the whole process. Not only that, experimenting could be really helpful as you are constantly trying different ways to present your work.
Findings
I have came to an agreement that Pinterest is an essential app for all designers as almost all of my pictures used from this task was taken from Pinterest. Also, the background remover website was really helpful as it saved me so much time instead of using photoshop to remove the background from my images.
FUTHER READING
FUTHER READING
This article listed some tips on how to improve your typography. Below are those that I found helpful:
- How lightening your font weights on a dark background can improve aesthetics and readability
- light text on a dark background appears heavier, unpolished
- recommendation is to use a variable font & adjust the font weight when in dark mode (reducing it by 50)
- Why reducing the line height of headings drastically improves their appearance
- reducing the line height of headings to 110-120% can make it look more compact. cohesive and polished
- Letter-space when using uppercase
- helps improve readability and it also makes your design looks more refined.
- recommended letter spacing: 5%
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